Nine Stones Close Stone Circle in the Snow

Nine Stones Close Stone Circle, Birchover, Derbyshire Peak District

What an excellent morning!  I gingerly drove out to Nine Stones Close Stone Circle this morning, in anticipation of getting this shot.  It took probably 90 minutes via Baslow and the stunning Chatworth Estate from Sheffield (50 minutes longer than normal), plus a walk in from an A road instead of the 300 yard walk from the unclassified road, but it was worth it.

Absolute silence.

It was how, I guess, it would have been for people prior to mechanisation, perfectly still save for nature and the local church bell tolling in the distance.

I was here to do pinhole, and I hope that I haven’t fluffed up my metering reading for that –  I do hope it comes out in a similar vain to the shot above (which is a 12 x 6 crop of an 8 shot panorama).

Note to diary, everything is 18% Grey, even snow…

Had a lovely chat with a teacher who was out with his kids, before his daughter got called in to work. (If you’re reading this don’t forget to drop me a note).

So thats one of two of my Nine Stones Close tick list ticked off.  The next is the mid summer moon rise between the two rocky out crops that you see in the background to the left – not quite sure how I will pull that one off in pinhole, but we’ll see!

“The rock, the mountain, the sky, the canyon, the coyote, the stars; all travelers in time, as am I. It calms me down, the vastness of it all.”

Unfortunately I didn’t say that, these great words come from Guy Tal in his blog post The Art and the Life. I’d recommend that you read all of his post.  That one sentence does sum up for me what landscape photography is all about, but its something that I struggle to articulate both verbally and photographically at the best of times.  The key thing for me is that photography isn’t my job, its my re-creation, its my downtime from work and all the strife that it creates. Whilst I can fall out with photography from time to time , “it calms me down”.

Castlerigg Stone Circle, Cumbria

Out and about in Barbrook and Gardom’s Edge

On Friday (6th of Jan) I managed to use my last day off of the Christmas and New Year holidays to go for a mini photography expedition some 20 minutes away from home in Sheffield.  The first stop was the Barbrook complex of stone circles and burial mounds up on the Big Moor.  Its a very barren place, but on Friday morning both the sky and the land were on fire with a most glorious orange light cast over everything.  Having been visiting Barbrook I and Barbrook II for nearly 6 months, with the fact that the bracken has died down I have observed other features off the beaten track, so I took the opportunity to explore these.  Looking at it from above on Google Maps you can discern a line of mounds extending from the Barbrook I stone circle (bottom right of map).  These appear to have been burial mounds, with two of them having apparently been excavated at some point (NB: This is conjecture on my part, I haven’t found anything yet that backs this up).

Photography wise, I was using my Bronica (with filters!) and my pinhole.  With the pinhole I have for sometime been shooting exclusively in 12 x 6 format, on this trip I switched between rolls of film to 6 x 6, always a format that has appealed to me, particularly for more intimate and up close shots.  I have had this concern whilst doing pinhole shots that given the height of most of the stone circles that the photographs may be getting a little nondescript, as with the exception of Nine Stone Close, most Derbyshire Stone Circles are quite low to the ground and its difficult I feel to convey the size and scale of these circles in the natural landscape.  Switching to 6 x 6 gave me the opportunity to get close to the detail of the individual stones and the plants around them – to try and put the circles and mounds in to context perhaps? Wet rock and frost covered fern.

One of the things I am continually struggling with just now is creativity and vision.  I think I’ve got the technique bit done on the digital side of things – put me in the right place with the right weather I can churn out what the person next to me is churning out.  What I lack I feel is the creativity and the ability to convey emotion, a difficult thing to do in the photographic medium possibly.  I lack an arts background, so I lack the vocabulary most of the time to articulate what I want to convey, then again I think someone said “If you have to write about your photograph and its message you have failed”, so that might be a double edged sword!  This year I hope to really challenge myself.  I’m going on a workshop in February that I hope will help me push my boundaries and help me understand the art of photography and not just the techniques of photography. James Dyas Davidson sums it up better than I can in his blog post here.

Update 18/01/12 – Guy Tal discusses creativity in his blog post.

After a frosty start, I moved a mere 100 metres to the Barbrook Stone Row, quite literally a row of 7 stones along an ancient track way. A difficult one to capture in pinhole, so I might have to go back and get closer to the stones, as even when you are a couple of feet away from the subject in pinhole it will appear about 4 times further away, so the rule that I need to start following is that you can never be to close.  What was more interesting for me, was a single up right stone down from the stone row, perfectly straight up and down, with what appeared to be cup marks on it.  I can’t find any additional information on this, but it just appears to be too “placed” for it to be anything but a standing stone. (NB: Again this is conjecture on my part).

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A wander down the Barbrook took me to a fine subject of a silver birch tree that is ripe for revisiting throughout the seasons.  I just loved the fact that the band of bracken led the eye right round to the base of the birch.

After a quick lunch in Curbar at Outside it was back out for more exploring, this time along Gardom’s Edge.  I’ve not been here before, so it was a nice change from continually revisiting old favourites.  After a walk across boggy moor land you enter a birch wood full of moss-covered boulders, a place to come back to I think.  I visited “The Three Men“, which have a great view looking out over Baslow and the valleys below.  It was slightly blowy (understatement), so for the first time in an eternity I used the hook on my tripod with my pack to weigh it down.  Again looking at my results, I need to get closer, you just can’t get close enough with pinhole it seems.

Some interesting information on Gardom’s Edge  is available here and here.

I went on to the cup and ring marked “stone” on the Edge.  I say “stone” as its actually a fibre glass replica of the original stone which is buried underneath the copy.  I’ve yet to develop the films from here, but hope they turn out good as its a special site, not that heavily visited, but often enough that the powers that be thought it best to protect it with the fibre glass copy on top.  As long as you don’t touch the copy the illusion remains complete

Finally, I went on to the standing stone on Gardom’s Edge – again a nicely under frequented site.  It was the end of the day and the sun was dipping so I took only one shot, but with a promise to return.  All in all a good day out in the field with some keepers as well.  Being a weekday the Peak District is almost a wilderness and those people you do encounter tend to keep their heads down and ignore you, I guess because they are as keen on having the place to themselves as I am (either that or they are down right rude! ).  Having the day to myself also allowed me to take my time, I always feel constrained/guilty when I have family in tow.  Constrained because I can’t wait for the right light or sit and take a location in.  Guilty as 2 four year olds have a finite attention span and pinhole photography doesn’t go hand in hand with that and its their time out as much as mine.

After a fulfilling day in the field I returned home to start developing my films, as I anticipate a bit of a backlog in the near future, best to process what I’ve done now.  I process all my own black and white films, have realised that I was shooting so much colour process black and white film that it would be more cost-effective to do it myself.  For more of a back ground on home developing (and printing) have a look at Steve Fell’s article.

So I wrote about my grand day out in the my previous blog post.  I quickly dropped my 9 rolls of film off at Harrison Cameras in Sheffield, so that I could get them back the next day.  I have to say that I wasn’t that impressed to be honest, the sky was blown out in a lot of the shots (I haven’t got round to working out the use of filters when using film).

You’d never guess that I was using Velvia 50 to shoot these (especially the last one!)

I wasn’t satisfied with most of what I shot, despite my enjoyment of the day and thinking that I was getting great shots.  I did however crack the problem of getting lines on my shots.  Call it “user error”.  It was me cranking the film on whilst the camera was still exposing – I am an idiot.  I’ve never had a truly manual camera before, so I was getting trigger happy winding the film before the shot had finished exposing. But at least I know  what the problem now – though I still catch myself doing it!

I went back to Padley Gorge on the Saturday, half expecting to find it mobbed with photographers given the spectacular show that Nature was putting on.  However, it was heavily over cast and threatening rain and this may have deterred some souls.  I had the place to myself which was quite nice.

I went back and revisited some locations that I had tried on the Tuesday with the intention to slow things down, and perhaps take some notes as to what I was doing with each shot.  With digital its easy, you just look at the EXIF information and its all there, date, time, ISO, exposure and aperture – a  record for all time of what you did to get the shot.  For manual, its a pencil and leather bound note book  for me that I do my photographic jottings in.

I’m very pleased with the two shots above, taken using Fujifilm Provia 100F, more so that I resisted the urge to set the saturation to “11″, as appears to be common in a lot of landscape shots of autumn.  Indeed I have seen one photographer’s shots of the same place where the bronzed leaves on the floor have been turned red in post production.

As I write this, its safe to say that the with the recent weather that the leaves are now off the trees for another year.  This is the first time that I have consciously “done” Autumn, though I am sure it won’t be my last.  Its one of those things that doing landscape photography has made me more aware of the seasons and what they have to offer, from knowing that  rain one day followed by clear skies overnight will lead to a high likelihood of mist the next day, to where and when the best poppies will appear in May and June.  So its not only my knowledge and appreciation of photography that is growing, its my understanding of nature and the fact I’m slowly getting keyed in to it.

Well, a quick look at the weather forecast determined that I was taking today off.  According to”The Times” (so it must be true!) last weekend was the optimum time to see the autumn colours.  Given that the in laws were stopping over I didn’t want to appear more rude then usual to them (joke), so I had to defer to today to visit Bolehill Woods and Padley Gorge.

Before “doing” Bolehill, I revisited a staple of mine, Mother Cap and “that” millstone beside it near Surprise View Car Park – mainly to put right with film an HDR abomination that I created some years ago.

Shocking isn’t? Hopefully some 120 Provia 100 will right this wrong, but we’ll see!

Before that I went up to Mother Cap, which is a lump of rock about the size of house that seems to have avoided glacial and/or wind erosion.  I took a couple of pinhole exposures using Pan F, so they were in the region of 13mins with variable light.

I then headed off to Bolehill woods.  Most of the silver birch appear heavily denuded of leaves.  That said there was still enough interest to keep me busy for a couple of hours pottering around.  It was also just nice to sit and have a coffee and take in the scene and all the sounds around.

After lunch at the Grindleford Cafe, I headed up Padley Gorge.  I was slightly concerned as for a week day there was a lot of tripods, cameras and LOTS of L glass wandering about.  I even spoke to some of them!!  I did find that having my old Bronica with me cut through all the Canon/Nikon digital willy waving, because (as we all know)  film is best.  There was one gent that I spoke to from Lichfield, he was at a loss as to what to do, as he said he had been up  and down the Gorge a couple of times already and he wasn’t sure whether to go up again – he was visibly excited about the light and the fantastic conditions – which was quite infectious.

I had planned on catching the sun set over at Hordron Stone Circle, as the sun sets on or near Win Hill at this time of year, which is meant to be aligned with one of the stones.  However, I was having too much fun in the Gorge, despite my Wellington boot malfunction which I only discovered on entering the stream #coldwetfeet.

I have to say that it was one of my best photography days for a while, the light was fantastic, especially after 1400hrs when the sun shone right up the Gorge illuminating the trees around some of the waterfalls in the depths of the Gorge.  I ended up going through about 9 rolls of Provia and Velvia today – that will keep Harrison Cameras going for a while longer when I drop them in for processing tomorrow.  I’d love to go back tomorrow, however with my addiction to film I can see me going through a similar amount of film again if I did.

I mentioned in my previous post that I had done an exposure using Pan F that took 38 minutes.  Well here it is, nothing inspiring at all about it at all, no detail in the rock carving that I was wanting to capture.  Flat, flat, FLAT!! You can’t even tell that the rock is at its highest about a foot from the ground.  It just looks flat.

I would not have thought that I could have got any closer (see below) than about 2 feet, but clearly I could.  Ah well, you live and you learn, and thats what its all about.

That said, I did have my Bronica set up as well, and I hope that I managed to make some good images of the tree stump and holly tree that you can see in the background of the main image.  The light was perfect for that.

My love affair with pinhole goes from strength to strength, and it has been joined by Fujifilm Provia 1ooF.  I was originally planning on solely  using Ilford FP4 Plus with my pinhole, but reciprocity failure starts starts within seconds on most Ilford films.  However Provia 100F can be exposed for 2 mins before reciprocity failure kicks in – which is ideal for pinhole, given that the Zero Image Pinhole 612B has an aperture of f/158.  Using FP4 would mean mammoth exposures - but more of that later.

My other recent love is megalithic monuments in the Derbyshire Peak District.  One of the largest areas is the Barbrook complex which includes a stone circle (Barbrook I), a ring cairn (Barbrook II), many burial mounds and even a small settlement.  All that and its only about 20 minutes from my home.

I love the colours in the sky here.  My only regret on the day was that I didn’t appreciate that you can still use Provia 100F for exposures beyond 2 minutes.  Since then I have exposed 100F for 7 minutes using my pinhole and the results have been great.

I like the movement in the clouds here, again I wish I had been more adventurous with my exposure times though.

I started my pinhole adventure in late June shooting wide at 12 x 6 (thats 6 shots a roll!).  Since then I’ve dropped down to 9 x 6 because I felt the vignetting at the edges was a bit too much (but more of that later).  I was watching Steve Gosling on Landscape GB, he does his landscapes in 6 x6 format when using his pinhole.  Not quite sure if I can envisage myself using 6 x6 for landscape, flowers maybe.  One thing Steve did was to flip one of his images to make it more pleasing on the eye (and it was).  I know that this can be done in a wet dark room, but for what I am doing, I don’t think it would be “authentic”.  These standing stones have been around for millennia and other people better placed than me have put the stones down the way that they are, so who am I to change their vision?

BOOM! Here it clicked for me (so to speak).  The dawn light just kissing the first two stones at Nine Stone Close (above), the mist adding to the softness of the pinhole – it all just came together for me on this shot.  What aided this I felt was that my metering is getting better.  Having got a TTL viewfinder for my Bronica, (yes I realised that didn’t help with the pinhole!) I got a spot meter.  With that and following a suggestion from Dav Thomas I got a book on exposures and the zone system – once you  accept that everything is 18% grey everything falls in to place )

In this really mixed light situation at Doll Tor Stone (above and below), I managed to (I think!) balance the shadows and the highlights quite well.  Provia has a nice latitude I think which is quite forgiving (I’m not going to take all the credit for this exposure). Doll Tor is quite an intimate location in mixed woodland.  Not only does the site have a small circle, there are a number of cairns nearby which have shown evidence of cremations.

Having settled on 9 x 6 as my format of choice, and having understood exposure better I thought I would revisit 12 x 6.  I went back to Barbrook II stone circle, to catch some evening light, hoping that the low sun would cast shadows that would extenuate the low lying stone circle.  After a small bout of photographer rage at another photographer who was clambering all over the site and not making any account of me and what I was trying to shoot (e.g the whole site).  After 40 mins I got the site to myself again and created this.

I’m crouching behind the tripod so as to avoid my shadows being cast over the site.  I added a couple of seconds to the exposure in an effort to bring out the detail around the edges and so that the vignetting was perhaps not as heavy as it could have been.

I’ve yet to develop a couple of rolls of Ilford Pan F, which is rated at ISO 50, that I took on this trip too.  Unfortunately despite the long exposures the idiot I’ve mentioned may well have been in shot.  As an aside I was in the local woods today (Sat 22nd Oct) and one Pan F shot took 38 mins.  I initially metered for an exposure of 4 secs @ f/22 which converts to 3 minutes @ f/158, but as Ilford Pan F starts to fail after a couple of seconds I had to increase my time to account for reciprocity failure by a factor of 1.49.  I may well try to develop these films tomorrow if I have the time.

The problem (if it is a problem) with Derbyshire Stone Circles, is that with a couple of exceptions they are very low lying with few stones rising  above a metre in height.  As a result in the summer and autumn grass and bracken almost engulf most sites, and cairns are hard to spot.  Come the winter and early spring these should be more easy to spot, and hopefully be better to shoot with the low sun (and hence long shadows) and less undergrowth (though I do wonder about bringing some shears along just in case!).

A burial cairn in the cairn field that lies between Barbrook II and Barbrook I.

This is the tallest stone in the Barbrook I stone circle.  According to what research I have done to date, Barbrook I is one of the best examples of a stone circle in the Peak District.  Its quite over grown, but with the seasons changing this (I hope) should die back.  Though if this is one of the best examples of a stone circle, I think I might have lower my sights in terms of what I want to achieve.

I love making pinhole images of standing stones, the pinhole’s in built softness adds to the timelessness of the stones I feel – or is that me being over romantic?  I still need to develop an overall style I feel.  With the pin hole I have to brave and get in closer and lower, as the pinhole is  W  I  D  E  !

Last year I had the opportunity to go to Lisbon on a works Christmas holiday – due to the weather in late November I ended up being the only one that actually made it to Lisbon. I had a ball to myself  Here is a selection of my images that I made during the trip.

Last Friday I went out again with just a bag of film cameras (Bronica, Zero Image and Xpan). The weather forecast was not promising and it was correct. I started off at a very bleak Barbrook II stone circle, the intention being to catch the shadows cast by the low sun, as the stone circle itself is pretty low to the ground.

Sunrise was a non-event, so I jumped back in my car and headed towards Curbar Gap, where I wandered along Curbar Edge and set up to watch the mist roll up the side of the Edge and drink my coffee.  If nothing else, getting back in to landscape is getting me out and about. It also gives me the chance to just sit and watch the world go by.

The problem I have at present is that I’ve never done off camera metering doing landscapes.  All my cameras to date have had some form of through the lens metering.  I’ve used light meters in the dim and distance past in studios (when the Site Gallery in Sheffield “did” photography).  But metering in a studio is different to metering in the landscape, as generally you can’t get close enough to what you want to meter as its the hill in the distance.  Following an exchange with a number of Twitterites, the conclusion is that I need a spot meter.  Which on ebay cost around £100 (UPDATE:  Thats the starting price – usually go in the end for £180).  This film photography lark is starting to get expensive!

After shooting (rather poorly) the bridge across the River Derwent, I headed to Grindleford and after a full English in the cafe, I headed up Padley Gorge.  When I started it was dry, but moist under foot, but the time I got to the top of the gorge it was chucking it down and I wish I had brought my brolley.  From the wander up the gorge I got my best images of the day, as I could get in close and meter properly.  One downside of an Bronica ETRS is that the maximum exposure that you can make is 8 seconds.  Using the pinhole (yet to be developed) one of the images took over 7 minutes to take.  Tim Smalley has produced a very useful chart on reciprocity failure which is an important factor for a pinhole photographer, as having such a small aperture can push out your exposure times.  Currently I’m playing with Provia 100F as reciprocity failure doesn’t kick in until 2 mins, which covers most well lit situations when using a pinhole.

Padley Gorge is an amazing place to wander up (and down), its just so verdant and green – it would certainly put Velvia through its paces.  I don’t think I could ever bore of it, and given its so close to home I should visit it more often if I need to satisfy the photography bug.

This tickled me, I like the juxtaposition of the signs.

Just processed a batch of Ilford FP4 Plus, so expect a steady drip feed of various images as I scan them.

Sign Under Repair, Sheffield Hallam Student Union